Dan Wootton: Emmanuel Macron has been utterly humiliated by Russian tyrant Putin

Over the last fortnight there have been a lot of comparisons to Munich and the futile negotiations with Hitler in the months before World War Two.

Well, we now know who the Neville Chamberlain figure in this latest appeasement failure is.

Step forward Emmanuel Macron – the French President with small man syndrome – who has been utterly humiliated by the Russian tyrant Putin, given he returned from Moscow this month and assured his citizens he’d received a pledge from Russia that the Ukraine crisis would be de-escalated.

While the Labour party would have you believe Boris Johnson is being treated as some sort of joke on the world stage, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

His leadership in defending Ukraine from an illegal Russian invasion has been so effective that even Germany today reversed its appalling its policy to appease, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz making the morally correct but financially devastating decision to halt the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Boris knows the world must hit Vladimir Putin where it hurts: His pocket.

And today he led the way, announcing the first step in a promised barrage of financial sanctions, dismissing Putin’s claim to Ukraine and “absurd and even mystical”.

“This is the first tranche, the first barrage, of what we intend to do.”

Boris was right to stress the UK will continue to seek a diplomatic resolution till the last possible moment. We don’t want war. But, as it stands, Putin seems to have gone stark raving mad.

He is ignoring warnings that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine could bring down the Russian Federation and end his presidency.

And, unlike Macron, Boris has got this right from the off…

“This is just the first barrage of economic sanctions against Russia because we expect there is more Russian irrational behaviour to come. The sad thing is that at every turn our pessimistic predictions have been vindicated. I’m afraid all the evidence is that Putin is bent on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I think that would be absolutely catastrophic.

“If Putin continues down this track of violence and a full-scale invasion, it is absolutely vital that the effort that conquest should not succeed and Putin should fail.”

While there is an international energy crisis, sure to be exacerbated now, at least the UK is only reliant on Russia for three per cent of our supplies.

But the EU – which gets 42 percent of its imports from Russia – must never rely so heavily on Putin for oil and gas again, especially given we were all here just a few years ago after Putin’s take-over of Crimea.

“We’ve got to recognise that we were not tough enough and in the end we didn’t do enough as Europeans to wean ourselves off Russian oil and gas. We’ve got to snip the drip feed into our bloodstream from Nord Stream.”

No country has made itself more reliant on Russia than Germany, but thank goodness the new Chancellor Scholz finally got tough today.

All western democracies – even France – must back Boris and unite against Putin, the war criminal.